2014 feels like a lifetime ago. We were all different people seven years in the past, and that includes Isaiah Rashad. Yet, his illustrious breakout album from the same year, Cilvia Demo, still bleeds of newness, detailing the image of an enigmatic hip-hop force battling through his emergence by way of the current scene’s most experimentally daunting and ultimately influential debut. And now, just days away from his tertiary Top Dawg Entertainment LP, The House Is Burning, it’s time to take at least one last listen to where it all began.

 

Taken at face value – especially through the less experimentally nuanced lens that more than a half-decade in the past held in place when it came to hip-hop album expectations – Cilvia Demo is, for all intents and purposes, a wildly meandering clusterfuck of creative ideas and risks taken. And yet, it’s ultimately a blueprint laid for how to tether the entire range of intricacies an artist belaying his youth to the world tends to bring in tow. It’s the vital take on the coming-of-age tale – something that hip-hop artists like his TDE teammate Kendrick Lamar, by way of his 2012 masterpiece, Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City, know a lot about. There’s a proud and practiced history of rising hip-hop names drawing inspiration from the amalgamate of their upbringings to introduce who they are to the world in that moment of artistic transcendence and imminent stardom. Contemporarily, think about J. Cole’s 2014 Forest Hills Drive and Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap. For the greats, think about Nas’ Illmatic or The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. All tap into the shared and unendingly relatable coming-of-age narrative. All are keystone projects. And still, Cilvia Demo – originally prosed under the title, Pieces of a Kid – is one of the tradition’s finest examples, and that comes down to just how the coming-of-age tale, at the end of the day, is told.

 

It’s one thing to tell a cohesive story throughout the course of a well-thought-out project. It’s another thing entirely to have a story tell itself along the way, not only through the words spoken into existence – through the literal – but through the figurative, too – the interpreted; through the stylistic makeup of the rest of the album’s auditory aesthetic. And that’s exactly what Cilvia Demo, through all of its juxtaposing vocal layers, all of its dynamically interwoven production, and all of its telling, immersive, and relatable poeticism, accomplishes.

 

Isaiah Rashad’s knack at making fluid and contemplative the layering of his many differing approaches to the mic makes for a constant web of collaborations with himself. A hard-nosed, twang-hinged rap methodology makes his pervasive lyrical approach intrinsically encapsulating of a listener’s attention, while chopped and screwed underdubs, soft and emotive vocals, muffled, distorted adlibs, and a tendency for turning up the volume and the anger while in the heat of a verse, combine to make him – through the frame of Cilvia Demo – one of the more wide-ranging voices in hip-hop today. A listener could probably listen an acapella cut of the 14 tracks at length and have a jarringly vulnerable understanding of Isaiah’s personal complexities. That alone is a feat that not even every great lyrical rapper could accomplish with a debut, but Isaiah is nothing if not an open book, and to that book there are layers.

 

‘Y’all live for bitches and blunts, we live for weed and money….’ [R.I.P. Kevin Miller]

 

‘My Daddy taught me how to drink my pain away. My Daddy taught me how leave somebody….’ [Hereditary]

 

‘…when they see our age, they say we’re young, I’ll let you push me to the side. At least we fell in love with something greater than debating suicide….’ [West Savannah]

 

But, what’s just as telling about the greater Cilvia Demo cloth, and how it was dreamt into existence, is that the same listener could likely listen to only an instrumental version of the project, and come to know the emotional spectrums at play through the range of the story being told. Given that there is a mosaic of producers on board, that fact speaks volumes to how communicative a creator and how strongly adhering to his artistic ideals, Isaiah Rashad is. A listener connects, at every level, to the emotion of the album.

 

Beyond the exploration of Cilvia Demo’s collaboratively tethered sound experiment gone horribly, horribly right, also exists a look into what was happening in Central Tennessee at the time, as it pertains to what’s still happening – that same cultural renaissance that birthed Rashad’s debut – has only ramped up and elevated in the years since. The project, and the man behind it, exists as a strong example of the experimentally Southern hip-hop transcendentalism exploding from the underground scenes of Chattanooga and Nashville. Amongst many others from both cities – only separated from one another by a 90-minute drive – also coming to prominence in their own rights, Isaiah Rashad, at the onset of 2014, was a catalyst for and also a lens into what was ultimately to come.  From his own city and his own crew, The House (a name that finds its way into the name of Isaiah’s forthcoming album), Chattanooga talents like Michael Da Vinci, BbyMutha, and YGTUT (who is featured on The House Is Burning’s credits) continue to carve out broader corners of the hip-hop pillars for themselves. And up I-24, in Nashville a hip-hop and Neo-Soul oriented cultural renaissance is making the city perhaps the most exciting and promising small-market talent pool anywhere in modern music and its surrounding cultural spheres.

 

But back to the big markets, and the big name that now at least part-time LA-based Isaiah Rashad is, The House is Burning is out this Friday. Seven years removed from Cilvia Demo, and five still from his last album, acclaimed and celebrated The Sun’s Tirade, there have been few albums in recent memory more anticipated than this one. When wondering why, it’s easy to point at the length between releases, but for fans to remain so attached to an artist over such bouts of silence, there must be reason for that, too. And those reasons of which there are surely many, can all be heard in the layers of the masterpiece that is Cilvia Demo. So, for anyone counting down the hours until The House is Burning is released, fill that void with the timelessness of Isaiah Rashad’s debut. You won’t be disappointed with it, and you’ll likely find even more to appreciate about his new album.